


four towns that weren't very good to dick grayson and one that was

by bossymarmalade (maggie)



Category: Batman (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Bat Family, Gen, Gotham
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 11:32:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/pseuds/bossymarmalade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>your average five things fic, with a brief stop in deadwood</p>
            </blockquote>





	four towns that weren't very good to dick grayson and one that was

**Author's Note:**

> standard foreword: if i have written something problematic/oppressive to a marginalized group that you find hurtful, please please please don't think twice about telling me. i will never spew hate at you, will never attack you, and i will always thank you and make the change.
> 
>  
> 
>  Content notes: offensive language, references to prostitution and rape.  
> 

1) "Oh, look, Damian, look! Look at me!"

Damian gritted his teeth and faced intently forward. The last three times he had heeded such calls for attention, he had discovered Grayson posing in increasingly more ridiculous fashions atop miniaturized versions of famous world landmarks. While the Sphinx had been mildly entertaining, the Eiffel Tower and Stonehenge were not, and Damian wished it would stop.

"Isn't it enough that you implored me to accompany you on this trip?" Damian demanded, forgetting in his ire that he had resolved not to turn and instead finding Dick happily lolling along the Great Wall, batting his eyelashes and making a pouty moue at giggling passers-by. "Our time could be used so much more efficiently! I have several new attack moves to practice and a very complex model of a dilophosaurus to complete!"

"We *are* being efficient." Dick vaulted down from the Great Wall replica and lightly touched Damian's shoulder, effortlessly steering him into the Fairy Tales area of the park. "We both needed some down time what with the Royal Flush Gang working overtime over the past two weeks, and we need to check up on the Lewis Carroll section of Tinytown. Miniatures haven't been the Hatter's area of interest before now, but when the Gotham Art Gallery has half of its 'Atomized Alice' installation stolen? There's only one prime suspect."

"I suppose." Damian scowled at a knee-high Bambi recreation, although he could admit to himself that the young prince looked particularly sweet in a size that could balance on Damian's outstretched palm. He dragged himself away from the mental image enough to say, "--but this place is still silly. I can't see the point of it. Celebrities and scenes from movies and famous structures shrunken down? What is the value? There's no reason to take pleasure in being small." He pushed ahead and Dick watched Damian's dark head bob along in front of him.

"There's plenty of reason," Dick said softly, wistfully, resisting the urge to tweak a lock of that hair. Damian looked back at him, skeptical, and Dick smiled and amended, "tactical reasons."

Damian looked like he was going to protest, but by then they had reached the Wonderland display and Damian was busy frowning at the tea party table. "You may be correct," Damian said, and one of the little teacups suddenly shook with a high beep, and Dick had just enough time to knock Damian over and kick the tea party table away from the visitor path. The teacups and teapot all beeped as soon as Dick's foot connected, and the whole thing flew into an adjacent mermaid tank to explode, covering Dick in gobs of foul-smelling gelled "water".

"You might be correct too," Dick said glumly as Damian came over, maintaining a distance from his goo-covered brother. "This *is* a silly place." He brightened again, almost immediately. "Hey! Just like Camelot!" 

Damian shook his head. "Grayson, you are so weird."

\--- --- ---

2) Cold rain has been pouring down for days and it's collected shallowly in the bottom of the dug-out grave, more raindrops ploshing down into the water as Dick stares and shivers. His fingertips are turning numb, one by one. His toes in his mud-stained boots are already distant memory, nerveless and frozen.

"The important thing at this juncture of the fuckin' story," Ollie Queen intones sonorously behind him, "is to decide which heathen gold-adorned baby-thieving Gypsy deity you care to call upon with your supplications for tender mercies in the afterlife, keeping in mind that all gods and whatever goddesses exist are a capricious fuckin' lot at the best of times and bloodthirsty cunts at the worst. But--" the gun muzzle pressed to Dick's back slides down, taps against his hip, then lets up altogether, "--never let it be said that I'm the kind of hellbound cocksucker would stifle the fucking bleats and whinnies of the faithful. Let's hear what last words you'd like to offer up to the breathless heavens, hey?"

Taking a deep breath, Dick lets droplets collect on his lashes and hazily obscure his vision when he says, "You don't want to kill me, Mr. Queen." He hears the other man make a noise somewhere between amusement and annoyance, so he rushes onward: "Knowing that you have a vested interest in the future of Deadwood, sir, and that I may at first assessment seem nothing more than, as you say, a thieving Gypsy on his way through, I ask you to consider the possibility that I am, in fact, much more than what I seem, and that in considering this possibility you might also allow me the chance to demonstrate the talents which have led me to this camp despite knowing the reputation of my kind might bring me to exactly this sort of ignominious situation." Dick teeters on his unfeeling toes, the grave gaping open and wet and lolling below him. He raises his arms in a lyrical swoop to maintain his balance, poised between solid ground and perdition, hands describing grace while a swivel of his hips promises darker pleasures.

"Whores I have plenty of," Queen says, and it's definitely amusement in his voice now. "So unless your ass is soft and hot as biscuits fresh from the oven or you can milk a prick and have it spit up gold--" He stops talking as Dick slowly, deliberately raises one leg, calf coming up to nestle against his elbow, and he's there balanced solely on the balls of one foot, half-spread out over this grave that is to be his own if this fails to impress. 

Dick feels a big, warm hand in the small of his back, and for one gasp of a second he's tipping forward before he's yanked back away from the grey yawn of the grave. Turned to face Ollie Queen and his oiled moustache and his considering, hard look. 

"Lift your fucking leg like that only while in my employ and for the fattening of my purse," the man says, "and you've got yourself a fucking deal."

\--- --- ---

3) Dick rolled onto his side, clutching the pillow to his stomach. "ohhhhhhh," he moaned weakly, "that's the last time I try to keep up with a speedster on a tour of Vegas buffets." 

Wally just laughed and ate all the M&Ms out of the mini bar.

\--- --- ---

4) The rain falls.

It falls and it fills his mouth, and she does too, with pet names and reassurance and bang and stop and no and don't

touch me

and Dick keeps dreaming it, over and over, a moebius strip dream of Blockbuster and him and Tarantula and cold rain and hot blood. It's hard for him to figure out what part of it he had control over, which section he would have been able to jump up into and declare, "no! this isn't happening!" and tear the moebius into teensy-tiny confetti pieces. Maybe that moment got skipped over, somehow, dusted through and erased entirely. Maybe he'd never had a chance.

Bludhaven isn't a comforting town, his town, and Dick gets the unnerving feeling that it's curling its claws around him, vulture claws, holding him for delectation while it picks at his still-living flesh. There's no solace to be found anywhere here. There's only the promise of pain and death, and bang, and stop, and a tarantula forever ticking her way along his body where he doesn't want it to be.

"Don't touch me," Dick says, and they sound like words he's never said before, and maybe that's why she didn't stop, bang, bang, bang. Rain in his mouth, filling his eyes, filling them up like blood.

\--- --- ---

5) What people don't understand about Gotham is the way that it builds up in you on a molecular level, in the cells of your entire being. "Oh, yeah -- like cancer," Kyle had smirked once when Dick made a mild attempt to explain, and Dick had laughed and moved onto other subjects. He understood. Non-Gothamites had no real reason to show loyalty.

They hadn't lived through Joker venom in the municipal water supply, or Ivy creating a labyrinth in Robinson Park, or the time the City Hall plaza was filled with carnivorous orbs, or seen the Penguin fill the Vauxhall with albatrosses during the Ring Cycle.

They didn't go home after battling these things to the big sprawling Manor up in Bristol Township to be met by Alfred with toasty warm robes and mugs of cocoa (once they finished debriefing and came up from the Cave, of course, and sometimes he'd even bring them down), or have birthdays there on the wide manicured lawns, or find secret hiding places up in the most climbable trees. 

They didn't make a home there, a nest, a family, after those bleak days and weeks when it had seemed that all of the light in the world had gone out in a mess of gore and sawdust under the swinging, empty trapezes.

They didn't get to be raised under the wing of the Batman. 

Dick understands why people didn't care for Gotham, sure. Heck, even Clark doesn't like it much. But Clark had been raised in breezy, open fields, and the chattering claustrophobia of Gotham would never be able to lure him. That's okay.

Gotham only loves the ones who love her first. And Dick had given his heart willingly, openly, and for keeps.


End file.
